Digestion of a Cultural Tasting Menu

It is difficult to absorb the intense, non-stop nature of the trip we had just completed. Every day was jammed with as much as we could see. The loose itinerary we left for ourselves was liberating, but it took a lot of focused, on the spot planning to make it efficient. The short timeframe required the majority of our traveling to happen overnight. We were constantly tired, but the wanderlust kept us going all the same.

In this sense, it is only fitting that the last day of our trip was a brief and exhausted encounter with the Italian Port city of Trieste. As our overnight bus arrived into the terminal from Split, we took our stiff and tired bodies into the sleepy early morning streets in search of a good place to sketch and some cappuccinos. In a few hours, we would hop on a flight to Barcelona (and encounter the biggest asshole of a cab driver), where our adventure would continue at a more relaxed pace.

Sketching is something that we started doing regularly in Croatia as a means to slow ourselves down. It was a way to sit at one spot, enjoy a drink or two, and focus on one specific piece of the built environment in front of us. The more we engaged in this, the more addictive it became. And while we regret not having started sooner in the journey, we have continued to sketch today.

Jennifer Wong, Trieste

Alexander Morley, Trieste

Jennifer Wong, Split

Jennifer Wong, Dubrovnik

Alexander Morley, Split

Alexander Morley, Dubrovnik

Jennifer Wong, Dubrovnik

Alexander Morley, Dubrovnik

Jennifer Wong, Trieste

We easily could have spent more time at every place we visited, and our biggest regret of the trip is that we did not have more time to stay and see additional countries. Nonetheless, we garnered so much from our short time, and the experience was a true tasting menu as we moved our way south from the Baltics to the Balkans.

We will each go further into our own adventures in future posts, and we still have more to say on our past semester in Finland. In the mean time, we would like to thank you all for reading. It has been a wonderful way to relive, condense, document, and digest our experiences and thoughts within this beautiful profession. There are many, many more to come.